NewWest.Net Highlight: The 'Next Aspen': Part I

Park City, Utah: ‘Where Have All the Ski Bums Gone?’

By David Frey, 12-29-07

A week before the slopes are set to open for winter, Park City, Utah’s streets – wet with rain that can’t bring itself to turn into snow – are nearly empty. It is the depths of off-season, when tourists and part-timers are gone and resort towns turn themselves back to the locals. So where are the locals? As I walk down the street, I can’t help but feeling a little like this old mining town has become a ghost town.

Park City marks the beginning of my off-season journey through some of the Rockies’ premier ski resort towns, not in search of powder days but of a resource even more precious to ski towns than snow: the character that gives each community its unique sense of place. These are towns that, along with their neighbors, have undergone some of the most dramatic recent changes in the West.

They also serve as bellwethers as more and more towns become caught up in an economy based less on traditional resources than on lifestyle. It’s not even about skiing anymore. It is about people seeking out a corner of the West that calls to them.

	Mass at St. Mary's Catholic Church.

Three places around town are busy. At the sports bar, football fans gather for the game of their choice on flat screens flickering around the bar. Above town, equipment rumbles at the construction site for the massive new resort hotel rising out of the mountainside. And at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, 150 Latinos – a growing anchor of the city’s workforce – gather for Spanish Mass.

“¡Que viva Jesus Cristo!” Father James Flynn intones.

“¡Viva!”

My journey will end in Aspen, Colo., 30 miles up the road from my home in Carbondale. In a way, I am looking for the “next Aspen.” Go to any bustling resort town and you’ll hear these words: “We don’t want to be the ‘next Aspen.’” Aspen has become synonymous with the resort slide toward luxury over locals, the epitome of the trend other resorts say they want to avoid, even as five-star hotels and million-dollar condos shove workers farther and farther away.

Like ski resorts across the West, soaring real estate prices have chased most ski bums out of Park City, pushing young people and families into nearby towns like Heber City, a ranching town 17 miles away. They’ve been replaced by Latino immigrants, who have filled the cheaper rentals in town. The result: Park City has become a sandwich without a middle. The rich and service classes share a town whose middle class, except for some long-timers and a few lucky newcomers, is vanishing.

David Frey's off-season journey through some of the Rockies’ premier ski resort towns took him in search of the "next Aspen," whatever that might mean. "Aspenization" is seen as either a blessing or a curse in ski towns and in this five-part series, David sets out to find out which is which in Western towns that, along with their neighbors, have undergone some of the most dramatic recent changes in the West. Click below to catch up with the other parts of the series... Part I: Park City, Utah: 'Where Have All the Ski Bums Gone?' Part II: Ketchum, Idaho: A Five-Star Dilemma Part III: Big Sky, Mont.: It's a Community. Is it a Town? Part IV: Jackson Hole, Wyo.: ‘Every Town Has its Song’ Part V: Aspen Colo.: Devil or Guardian Angel?

“It’s kind of a shame,” says David Schultz, a nature photographer with a gallery on Park City’s Main Street. Stunning images of mountains and animals, many shot close to home, cover his walls. “One day you see these little mining shacks and the next day, you see a three-story monster home. It kind of takes away the charm. But you know, it’s all part of it.”

Schultz epitomizes the dilemma of mountain resorts. The wealthier clientele is great for business, but the growth hacks away at the character he tries to capture in his lens. A 20-year resident, Schultz is among those who commute from Heber City. When he advertises a job opening, replies often come from South America. “You don’t have the ski-bum type of thing you used to have 20 years ago,” he says.

My trip will make me to Ketchum, Idaho; Big Sky, Mont.; Jackson Hole, Wyo.; then Aspen. Their dilemmas -- high-priced housing, workers pushed out of town, traffic snarls caused by a commuter culture -- could be photocopied and stapled to the welcome sign at each of them. These towns have something else in common, too: a core of locals who care passionately about their hometowns and they fight – and bicker – to protect an unmistakable flavor that can’t be photocopied. In a New Western clash between character and cash, they're torn between the small-town funk residents once came for and the high-end poshness that draws many newcomers.

With my dog Didgeridoo, a gangly, sandy-colored mutt with an uncommon love for snow, in the backseat, I drop into Park City by night, following a remote back road that winds from the urban grid of Salt Lake to the resorts of Alta and Brighton. As it climbs into the Wasatch Range, it gives way to a washboard track that cuts sharp corners along stands of spruce and pine. Below, at night, this old mining town glitters like a high mountain lake. Up close, Main Street is lined with swanky tourist shops. On the outskirts spreads a locals’ shopping town: McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, Bed Bath & Beyond and the Gap.

One thing that makes this town unique is what it boasts in its marketing materials: Great powder skiing just 30 minutes from Salt Lake City at Park City Mountain Resort and Deer Valley. That’s not just good for tourism. It has forged a unique relationship between urban Salt Lake and this little town of 8,000. Park City professionals head off to jobs in the city each morning, something most ski town residents can’t do. Salt Lake residents come in to Park City to work, joining throngs from nearby towns like Heber and Kamas. The daily onslaught creates traffic snarls on Bonanza Drive. The local public radio station broadcasts daily urban-style traffic reports -- without the helicopters.

A ribbon of open space purchases protect Park City itself from sprawl somewhat, and a recent open space purchase will spare even more acreage, but miles of pasture stretch out across a broad valley. It’s hard not to wonder how long it will be until those fields sprout new subdivisions and shopping malls.

	Park City open space is framed by large homes on the skyline. Photo by David Frey.

“I think these mountain towns are going to keep booming,” says City Councilman Joe Kernan, recently elected to his second term after a door-to-door campaign by bicycle. “As long as there are people in some city that is a quick plane flight from here, making a lot of money, they’re going to keep buying stuff here.”

Park City has worked hard to protect the Old West feel of a mining town turned ski town. Big-box stores are banned, and historic buildings are preserved. The old Masonic building now hawks chic Western wear. The old mortuary is a sushi restaurant.

Preserving the human element has been harder. With property values doubling over the last decade and some $2 billion of new real estate set to hit the market in the next few years, the working class has largely been driven out of town as builders court the well-heeled. The median home price is $1.27 million. Of 218 homes recently listed for sale, only 18 were less than $500,000.

	Resort construction.

“We’re out of our league,” confesses Sue Fassett, manager of Dolly’s Bookstore, who moved to town with her architect husband from Hawaii’s Big Island two years ago. They thought Hawaii was expensive. As they rent a home in town, they’ve found Park City’s housing prices and cost of living hard to handle, but they’ve vowed to stick it out in the heart of town. It was Park City, after all, not Heber City, that lured them from their tropical paradise.

“The outer areas are nice,” Fassett says, “but coming from where we came from, we want to live here. We don’t want to commute 20 minutes, 30 minutes, if we are leaving what we just gave up.”

The city and Summit County have some 569 affordable housing units around town, and another 128 pending, but they don’t satisfy the demand. That’s made places like Heber City more like the way Park City used to be, says Kernan, who runs a recycling company that picks up bottles and cans from mansions and mining shacks.

	City Councilman Joe Kernan

“Heber will have that diverse population of young people, old people and everybody,” Kernan says. “That will be the place. If somebody wants to hang around real people, you’ll want to hang out in Heber.”

That’s not to say there aren’t real people in Park City anymore. It’s just that most speak Spanish. Latching onto the rentals vacated by workers looking for a place to own outside of town, immigrant workers have moved into town. It hasn’t always been an easy transition. Letters to the editor of the Park City Record have sometimes railed against the illegal immigrants that businesses quietly rely on, alongside the short-term visa workers who come for a season, then go home.

Kernan, a political independent, has tried to defuse those issues. About 10 years ago he started an “Hola and Hello” program designed to get Spanish speakers and English speakers to at least say hi when they pass on the street.

“It helped quiet the darker side of the population that is no comfortable with these people being here,” says Kernan, who has watched Anglos move out and Latinos move in to his own affordable-housing neighborhood. Officials estimate about a fifth of Park City is Hispanic. Kernan figures that Latinos live in half the rentals in his neighborhood.

“Where have all the ski bums gone?” he asks.

But he knows the answer. They have either given up on the dirty work that keeps resort towns running, or they’ve gone to surrounding communities, commuting through small-town gridlock until, often, they find work closer to home and give up on Park City altogether. They are replaced by millionaires who can afford the homes they can’t.

	Sunday mass.

And they are replaced by people like Lorenzo Contreras, Daniel Vargas and Mauricio Hernandez. Three friends from Michoacan, Mexico, they arrived just days earlier after being recruited by Deer Valley for restaurant work. They are visa workers, here for a season before heading home, provided with housing by the resort. And though they have few friends in town, speak almost no English and have never stood in snow, they come looking for a salary they wouldn’t likely find back home.

“It’s a good opportunity,” Hernandez says.

As they walk to Wal-Mart to stock up for winter in a new town, in a new country, they join the swelling ranks of immigrants who have come in, to Park City and to resort towns across the West and around the nation, as the local working class has moved out.

This is the first installment of a five-part series on NewWest.Net in which David Frey travels across the West to explore the idea and the whereabouts of the "next Aspen," in every sense of the phrase. Check back each day for the coming installments. Up next: Ketchum, Idaho: A Five-Star Dilemma.

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